Resource management construct for an adaptive DBF electronic support receiver

This paper provides a resource management (RM) framework for electronic support (ES) receivers. The resource manager estimates the number of interference signals and the bandwidths of each interference signal in the electromagnetic (EM) environment. Environment estimates are used to select an appropriate adaptive digital beamforming (DBF) algorithm from a predefined look-up table (LUT) of adaptive DBF algorithms. Algorithms are selected from the LUT based on their ability to increase the signal-to-interference plus noise level of the desired signal by a desired amount; the algorithms are also selected based upon their computational complexity. A study of the resource manager computational complexity demonstrates that applying the new architecture does not increase the receiver computational complexity above standard ES receivers. The resulting adaptive receiver is capable of operating with reduced computational loading over standard support receivers. The framework allows for the use of a single receiver for both narrowband and wideband operation without imposing unrequited computational complexity in the narrowband environments.